Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Stay on Target

I just realized that this is my 100th blog post. I don't know whether to celebrate or be really afraid. That's a lot of posts about what most would consider a pretty mundane topic of leveling.

This past week has really been about the rogue and the shadow priest. We took a bit of a long weekend this past weekend so that slowed my leveling a bit, although my numbers for the month are still holding up pretty well. I managed to get the rogue to level 71 before switching to the shadow priest.

The rogue continues to be the most challenging of these remaining four toons in terms of overall survivability and leveling speed. I guess part of the issue is that the mage, priest and shammy either take no damage at all or have self healing abilities. The new Recuperate ability being given to rogues in Cataclysm will be a huge boon for leveling rogues.

As I work on finishing him off, I may switch to leveling him in battlegrounds. I have found that particularly in the 70's, if it is a Call to Arms weekend, the xp per hour from doing the Call to Arms battleground is usually slightly higher than what you get from pure questing. And if you're in a battlegroup where your faction dominates so that your win ratio is well over 50/50, it should be as much as 10-20% higher than questing.

After getting the rogue to 71, I then switched to the Shadow Priest and managed to get him to level 77. I've tried doing some battlegrounds on him as well. I've tried as both shadow and discipline. While I've heard great things about Discipline for PvP, I'm not finding it to be as much fun as I thought it would be. It's possible though that it's because I'm geared more for Shadow, so I'm running out of mana way to fast. Something about just bubbling everything in sight that just isn't all that personally satisfying.

I have been really pleasantly surprised by how good the shadow priest's dps has been in instances, though. And that was even before picking up Mind Sear at 75. But it still is substantially less xp per hour, so I'm really just doing one a day to get the Triumph emblems.

So we're still on Target for early September. Current forecast is for September 7th, and I've been knocking out 0.94 levels per day so far in August. I'll be switching back to mage once my realm comes back up from its extended 24 hour maintenance on Wednesday and I likely won't stop until I hit 80 on the mage!

2 comments:

I was looking over Joarstab in the armory since you mentioned his survivability, and I noticed a few things.

His gear is definitely good, but isn't enchanted. You could get +3 or +4 to all stats for the chest piece, and if you have an alt that's exalted with Aldor or Scryer, they could put the high level shoulder enchant on his heirloom shoulders for him.

You're an engineer! Take advantage of it. If you're over level 65, you can powerlevel it to 450, or 400 at least. Those Mechanized Snow Goggles are kickass from level 65+, especially since you can engineer enchant it with 45 stamina from the Mind Amplification Dish, since the goggles don't have a "use" ability already.

Pyro rockets on your gloves are great for some added damage, or a long ranged pull.

Flexweave underlay for your cloak for an added 23 agility and slowfall.

Dual Sonic Boosters or Gnomish Lightning Generators, or 1 of each. Just be careful though, if you have the GLG's hotkeyed, and leave one in your bags or your bank, it won't trigger the trinket.

Bombs, bombs, bombs!

If you don't want to spend more Triumph Badges, the Sharpened Scarlet Kris from WG stone keeper shards are excellent leveling weapons.

Remember, engineering is OP at the level breaks, and gradually goes downhill from there. If you hit 80, there's only a few things at that level that really benefit you from engineering.

I play on PvP servers, so I always have to balance survivability versus damage, just to give me a better chance if I get jumped.

You can check my character sheet if you like for any ideas.http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Demon+Soul&cn=Thrillkiller

Hey Bloodshrike! Thanks for the tips. My engineering is sitting right at 350 now, but I've got the mats sitting in my mailbox to get it the rest of they way - so sounds like it's definitely worth taking an hour or so to knock it out before I start questing again. Since that's essentially my last profession to max now, I had no idea it had all those neat extras available. I was just excited to have the flying mount!

And for some reason I always forget about the Scryer enchants - which would certainly be easy enough to pick up on Joar.